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In certain situations, characters (and writers, it seems) just have to make certain puns or references. And they're usually the same ones. But Tropes Are Not Bad, as in many cases the audience may feel disappointed or even slightly confused if the obligatory joke fails to come up.

Whenever a mummy (as in a preserved corpse, like from Ancient Egypt) appears, someone's gotta make a joke about the alternate use of "mummy" to mean "mother." ("I want my mummy!")

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Anything involving Pyramids, or simply Egypt, will be dubbed a "pyramid scheme" at some point.

Clones will prompt jokes about being beside oneself, Me's a Crowd, using "I" instead of "he" or "she" when talking about one of their clones, and possibly jokes revolving around Screw Yourself (either overtly or past the radar).

If you have a Special Guest you had better make a remark on what they are most famous for. What's the point of having Mark Hamill show up if there isn't going to be a Star Wars reference?

Any object that's "to die for" will involve someone who already did die for it, or actual mortal peril for anyone who seeks it.

A villain intent on feedingthe hero to carnivorous critters may make a quip about "staying for lunch/dinner/breakfast".

After someone falls into a Trap Door, his captor may remark on how he just "dropped in".

Anytime there's a long trip with somebody who is young, dumb, and/or snarky there will be some variation of the Are We There Yet? joke.

Doctors must be greeted with "What's up, doc?", especially if the speaker is a villain.

These days, Obligatory Jokes tend to be subverted in the vein of Anti-Humor or So Unfunny, It's Funny. One character could say "Aren't you going to say <X>?" and get a confused look or a deadpan "No.". Critics and reviewers tend to use them fairly regularly, Lampshade Hanging optional.

Bond in general is very fond of bad puns, so pretty much always goes with the obligatory joke. Particularly Pierce Brosnan's Bond. It got to the point where audiences were shocked when he didn't make one.note In Die Another Day, when asked what took him so long after in a spy car vs spy car fight, he avoided the obvious joke "car troubles"

Nicholas: I left him in the deep freezer. Danny: Did you say "Cool off"? Nicholas: No. Danny: Shame.

In Casino Royale (1967), Q is outfitting his character with spy gadgets, including a fountain pen that shoots a stream of poison.

Tremble: It must be very useful when writing —-

Q: — a poison-pen letter, yes. All our new agents say that.

Literature

Belles on Their Toes: During one chapter where the Gilbreth boys are shopping for clothes en masse and the salesman asks them what they "want in a shoe", one of the boys tells the others that they had better not say "a foot" to avoid bothering the salesman any more than they are.

The Dresden Files: To hear Harry Dresden tell it, he's the original this. He claims that he's now so well known that if he isn't flip and punny to every supernatural being of a distinctly higher weight class than him, they'll be insulted, because they expect him to be. Note that this was a retrospective excuse to Sigrun for pissing off Odin's secretaries.

Only a few people actually make jokes about Moist von Lipwig's name in Going Postal, but he seems to think people will, saying things like "I've heard all the jokes" and "Please don't laugh."

Likewise with Adora Belle Dearheart. "As you can imagine, I have no sense of humor whatsoever."

Quoth is a talking raven, saddled with an obvious joke name (the wizard who named him is one of those people proud of a sense of humour he doesn't actually have), who "doesn't do the N-word".

The raven in American Gods doesn't do it either, and is blunter than Quoth on the subject.

"Fuck you", said the Raven.

Animorphs: "Let's do this!" is Rachel's Catch-Phrase, said whenever about to go on a dangerous and possibly lethal mission. Marco, being the comedian of the group, does what he can to prevent the gag from going stale:

Castle uses the "tied up right now" variant when the eponymous character had bound himself to a chair to see whether he could free himself. Played with in another episode Lanie finds out that the recent victim, who had been burnt in a pizza oven, has the last name "Burns". She tells Castle, who had started to look excited, to make the Obligatory Joke...but it turns out that Castle had actually recognized the name.

Castle is fond of these. In Castle's first Nikki Heat novel, hisAuthor Avatar is introduced by saying "It's raining men" when a crime scene contained an outdoor table umbrella with a victim's blood and guts on it.

Get Smart. Maxwell Smart is trying to break into a villain's hideout when a trapdoor drops him into a chair in front of the villain who starts to say, "Mr Smart, how nice of you to..." with both Smart and the villain finishing in an ironic tone "...drop in, yes."

After the first act of the Jaye C. Morgan episode of The Muppet Show, where Morgan wears a ruffled bird outfit:

Statler: Ooh, Jaye P. Morgan is terrific!

Waldorf: Yeah, but that last number was for the birds!

Statler: You had to make do joke, did you?

Waldorf: Well, one of us had to, and I lost the toss!

Averted in Sesame Street, when Kermit the Frog reported from the throne room of Old King Cole.

Kermit: In just a second he's going to call for his pipe, he's going to call for his bowl and he's going to call for his fiddlers three. Let's listen. Old King Cole: What ho! Bring me my royal pipe, and step on it! Kermit: At this point you might think we'd go for the cheap joke, but we're not going to.

In RuneScape, when the player talks to their creeping hand pet (an animated, severed hand), they would invariably make a hand-related pun.

Web Comics

On this page of Dinosaur Comics, T-Rex complains about the overuse of the phrase "a whale of a good time" in conjunction with literal whales.

T-Rex: It should mean "a good time that is large or immense: METAPHORICALLY like a whale", but the metaphor's broken because it's always used on literal friggin' whales. "Dog-gone great" is getting there too.

In his review of The Care Bears Movie, when the leader of the Care Bear Cousins said his name, Braveheart, Critic showed a clip from Braveheart, asking how could he not do that joke.

He opened a review of the film Alaska with "Sarah Palin is stupid. There, I got my Sarah Palin joke out of the way, let's talk about Alaska."

The Critic also gets pissed off at Rover Dangerfield's use of the "corn dog" pun when Rover gets trapped in a pile of corn, especially because the whole movie is a Hurricane of Obvious Puns throughout. The Critic even has a mock gameshow where he has the "audience" submit guesses as to what pun Rover is about to use, only to show the pun immediately after the chime on the assumption that everyone has come up with the exact same answer.

Lampshaded when reviewing Bangarang, the short film Dante Basco created. Not only does Critic make the obligatory Avatar: The Last Airbender and American Dragon: Jake Long jokes, he also provides convenient time stamps on exactly how far into the video he waited, for the sake of any betting pools anyone had been running.

During Linkara's review of Cosmic Slam, he mentions that it's about baseball players fighting an outer space menace and that the audience knows what he has to do with that before he cues up The Quad City DJs and starts rubbing his head.

On Slashdot, there have been a lot of repetitive memes which users will continue to post to any half-relevant story along with "ob" lampshading that it was obligatory. Two examples: "I, for one, welcome our new [what the article is about] overlords (ob)", and, responding to a reasoned, compassionate, and well-rounded argument with "you must be new here (ob)".

RWBY simultaneously invokes, subverts, defies, and lampshades this all at once in volume 3 episode 2, courtesy of that year's Vytal Festival announcers.Details After the remaining three members of Team NDGO are thrown into the water, Neptune electrocutes all three of them at once with his weapon, winning the battle for Team SSSN.

In one episode of her vlog "The Flog," Felicia Day recommended a puzzle website called Jigidi. She finished the segment by saying "You can get jigidi with it at www.jigidi.com. I know I didn't want to say that, but I had to."

In the Danny Phantom episode "Doctor's Disorders", Penelope Spectra tries to get a sample of Danny's DNA to make a perfect body for herself. When she's not looking, Danny swaps it out with something from his dad's used handkerchief. The result is Spectra turning into a Jack Fenton-shaped snot monster. Danny comments, "There's a 'You blew it' pun here somewhere, but I'd rather not." When the fight begins, Spectra growls, "Let's boogie!" to which Danny replies, "That's exactly the kind of pun I was trying to avoid with the 'You blew it' comment!"

In a particularly silly episode of The New Batman Adventures, Robin and Batgirl are fighting genetically altered giant cows. Batgirl lampshades the fact that Robin couldn't resist yelling "Holy Cow!"

The page quote was used in Justice League after the heroes foiled Gorilla Grodd's plot to turn all of humanity into gorillas.

In "Rufus In Show", Kim discovers that the villain keeps electric eels, to which she replies, "The puns just write themselves. Shocking, isn't it?" Of course, the villain says the very same line later when he reveals his electric eels.

Lampshaded during Kim's first run-in with Dr. Drakken in "Tick-Tick-Tick":

Drakken: Enough chit-chat! My pets are famished! Perhaps you two could stay— Kim: For lunch? Drakken:(defensively) I wasn't going to say that! Ron: Oh, dude, you were so — "for lunch". Drakken:(exasperated) Aargh! Yes! Then — stay for lunch! (dumps them into the trap)

Subverting obligatory jokes makes up about 90% of The Simpsons—it's actually kind of shocking when they do play them straight.

Subverted in a short where Garfield and Jon check into an in, and the nutty old innkeeper tells them to "Walk this way!" while showing them their rooms, hunched over and walking with a gait. Garfield turns to the viewers and says, "Don't worry, we aren't doing that old joke". (Probably a double subversion, actually, because simply saying that was a variant of the joke.)

In one U.S. Acres segment where Orson describes cartoon humor, he states that anyone doing a chase scene in a cartoon is required by law to use the joke where the character paints a tunnel on a mountainside. (Exactly where this law is stated, he doesn't say.)

One example of this joke was unique to The Smurfs. In "The Astrosmurf", on a long trip to a volcano, one of the smurfs asked "Is it much father, Papa Smurf?" He replied, "Not far now." Another smurf repeated the question and he repeated the same answer again, through about three consecutive scenes; the joke ended with one of them asking it, and him replying angrily, "Yes it IS!" From that episode on, the joke was used every time they had to make a long trip; in fact, it was lampshaded in one late-season episode, where after one of them asked it a second time, Papa Smurf snapped, "Oh, don't start that again!"

On Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Gruffi refuses to get in the flying machine they've found, but as it's taking off, a rope snags him around the ankle and drags him into the air after it. His response when Zummi pulls him aboard and asks him what happened? "I was roped into it."

One rather unique example, yet somehow just as unavoidable as any other, happens in The Sponge Bob Squarepants Movie. SpongeBob pulls up to a gas station in a hamburger-shaped Cool Car. One of the attendants immediately asks, "What'll it be, fellas, mustard or ketchup?"

This was the reason Ralph Fiennes didn't reprise his role as Voldemort in The LEGO Batman Movie. Since he was already voicing Alfred, the writers knew they would have to have a "you sound familiar" joke. They couldn't figure out a good way to work it in, so they cast an entirely different actor to avoid the problem.

Real Life

When CNN was reporting on 2011 Egyptian Revolution, one of the cycled headers printed at the bottom of the screen was "Pyramid Scheme". It's a stretch to call it a "scheme" and it's a stretch to say pyramids had much to do with it, but, hey, obligatory.

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